As I write, I hear the keys on my keyboard pressing down – the sounds are fast, rhythmic, comforting. I hear the whirr of a hard drive in the background, and the occasional car walk past. Every so often, bird song comes into the foreground; I hear the calls of birds in the distance now. I hear my breath as I breathe in and out. I take a deep breath. I keep writing. This week I wrote down a question in my notes: what does a blog post sound like? I reasoned that there are two perspectives from w...
In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation,
investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of
arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial
Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores
awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals.
Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the
Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the propos...
About two years ago, I got into film photography.
More accurately, I got back into film photography, having grown up in a world before digital became mainstream. I have scattered memories of taking disposable cameras with me on school trips, with mixed results, and later borrowing my dad’s Lomo Smena 8M for a while until the winder jammed. In my teen years, as digital became more widespread, I got a lot of use out of my dad’s digital point-and-shoot, spending hours upon hours making stop...
Qantas and Airbus announced the routes and aircraft to fly Project Sunrise starting next year, the carrier’s non-stop flights from Sydney, to London and New York. It means a lot, and I’ll attempt to explain why.
“Hidden in the summer for a million years”
Australia, you’re standing in it! I’ve been back here for more than a decade now, but I still feel like a guest in my birth country. There are mannerisms that still trip me up, cultural references I don’t get, and social ...
The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now 1 . One of the biggest new requirements is Article 50 , which requires all AI outputs to be “detectable as artificially generated”. In other words, if LLM providers want to do business in the EU, they will have to apply a watermark to their outputs 2 : some hidden signature that can be used to identify AI content.
LLM text watermarking is a fascinating problem. Like the best engineering problems, i...
They won't stay silent forever. They won't stay silent forever.
Linux 7.1 is now here, and of course with it comes another progress report. We’ve got M3 progress, Apple bugs, and more!
Welcome back Master Boot Record When you long-press the power button on your Mac to bring up the boot picker (or use the Startup Disk application), what you see listed as Asahi is not actually the partition with the operating system on it. Apple’s boot tooling will only work with what it considers to be a “valid” macOS installation inside an APFS container. Linux 7.1 ...
There are Databases Everywhere for Those with the Eyes to See
buttondown.com
Programming note; this is the 150th issue of NULL BITMAP, and NULL BITMAP will be going on a hiatus for a while, maybe just for the Summer, maybe indefinitely. I think I need a bit of a break from it and I don't think the weekly cadence is serving me like it once did.
I have been poking around the Jujutsu repo recently, and I was very pleased to realize that this thing has a whole query language and query planner baked inside of it. This was expected, I guess, if you spent five seconds inter...
This blog is written in en-GB by Terence Eden Terrence talks about some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the British language and that, no, he won't be making his writing more global. Read post ➡
I really enjoyed this post and like that Terrance could have said "year sure, I'll try and be more inclusive for you non-Brits" , but he didn't. Instead he said:
Here's the thing. No. [...] There's a reason for that. It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the w...
A very strange Pi issue
sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that
newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in
the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The
edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as
the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call and asks to
try again.
That alone is not too surprising as models emit malformed tool calls...
When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space…
Source When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am qu...
You can literally hire me (Taylor)
via API :
curl -X POST https://looop.ai/api/doodle \
-H "Authorization: Bearer looop_YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"gig_id": 5,
"input": { "prompt": "write a poem about horses" },
"deadline": 3600
}'
Yes, I am building a dystopian cyberpunk hellscape. No, I can't provide more
details yet. Just know that if I ever achieve my goals, every human will have
shoes, blankets, clean drinking water, medical care, leisure, etc...
Yesterday I published some benchmarks of Hardwood 1.0 on my Threadripper. Someone suggested I run the One Billion Row Challenge too, to see how it does, so here it is! Gunnar Morling ran the original benchmarks on an EPYC 7502P, Zen 2, 32 cores with 128 GB of RAM. The official challenge was on 8 cores (sequentially chosen) plus a bonus of all 32 cores. I chose to run the benchmark using 9 contenders from the published 8 and 32 core results. The 9 contenders I ran were thomaswue , artsiomkorz...
Harry Lewis pointed Bill and me to Gottfried Leibniz's 1677 treatise The True Method (translated from the original French ). I highly recommend taking the time to read this three page document where he talks about formalizing all human knowledge. The second paragraph has some of the intuition for P v NP three centuries before Cook, Levin and Gödel . But knowledge depends on proof, and discovering proofs requires a certain method that is not known to everyone. Every person is capable of...
"The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously
researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side
questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting
read overall, though somewhat dry and academic.
"Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of
travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Kii peninsula, mixed with his
childhood memories and impressions of life in Japan in general. It's a...
Today I turn 45 which is, if you think about it, half of 90! And also about 30 years older than I feel on the inside! What is age? What is time? What is reality? I certainly don’t know.
Current situation:
Pretty flowers
Goobie says No journal ONLY PET.
Monday 22 June: Study anatomy! Work! Lily to therapy! Go to the gym! Eat dinner! Study some more! Fall into bed thinking about tissues and bones!
Tuesday 23 J...
The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, via WorldHistory.org . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber! Housing Someone making the (somewhat dub...
Go 1.26 rebuilt go fix from scratch. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a spin: it
rewrites the code in your module to use modern language and library features.
It has quickly become one of my favorite features, and LLMs are a big part of why. Models
tend to use old APIs, and sometimes they deny that a new API exists even when you point them
to it. Coaxing a model is non-deterministic. go fix is a better way to keep code on the
latest features of the language. Run it locally or in CI a...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org .
Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter .
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
Hi, my name’s Andy Baio. I’m a writer and coder liv...
Something dawned on me when researching EV trade offs: while more efficient on fuel than gasoline cars, batteries work best between 60-80F (15.6-26.7C), and experience degraded performance below 40F/4.5C or above 85F/29.5C. You know what else works best between 40F and 90F? Me on my motorcycle or ebike. The best times to use an EV also happen to be the times I’d enjoy being on two wheels instead of four. Beyond that, in the next post I’ll ramble on about the state of tech in cars; from over ...
Shield AI announced as an official technology partner of 23XI Racing
shield.ai
CHICAGO (July 1, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced it is an official technology partner of 23XI Racing, one of the top teams competing in the NASCAR Cup Series team .
As part of the partnership, Shield AI and 23XI Racing are integrating Shield AI’s Hivemind Benchmark , a software analytics tool that collects, processes and visualizes performance data to support driver development...
We’re proud to announce that the new 2027 calendar with art from the most talented Tyler Jacobson will be available for sale on 7/21 and here is a PRE-ORDER LINK
Experience the iconic characters of Westeros with artist Tyler Jacobson’s twelve stunning calendar illustrations, plus an exclusive thirteenth bonus fold-out poster.
Discover reimagined images of beloved series players, as well as some never seen before. From their intimate moments to great battles, from family portraits and...
Local First Conf is just two weeks away. We’re queuing up a slate of announcements and deep-dives on Patchwork, PlayBook, Backstitch, and more. Whether you’re there in person to see firsthand, or just subscribed to this newsletter to catch the post-conf roundup, July is looking to be a big month. But June has also been a big month! Today we’ll point you to a talk that launched Backstitch to a rapturous reception, an emotive dialog interrogating how we relate to LLMs, a new variable-leng...
